Absolutely agreed -- a common complaint about Crawl is that this is what's happened to it. But that doesn't mean you should ignore balance altogether either, and I'd say that extra shots is probably the oldest really outrageous balance issue in Vanilla today.

I also think that giving +might would feel better, because the player is doing lots of damage in single shots rather than lesser damage in many shots. Not to mention there'd be less ammo management hassle. And it's not like the player would be substantially unhappier to find a Sling of Buckland (x6) than a Sling of Buckland (x4) (+2 shots), right? It's still an awesome sling! It's just not "okay, now I kill literally everything in the game with pebbles because it's 300+ damage/round better than anything else I can do" awesome. Likewise, a randart that gives +2 might is pretty cool, just not so distortingly cool as one that gives +1 shots.

Sure; extra shots is really just speed bonus to a specific action. Which might actually be a good way to communicate what's going on -- I know people in the past have been confused when they see they get 2 shots/round but still only fire once per 'f'ire action. "+20% faster shooting" would probably make more sense than "+.2 extra shots".

As a matter of taste I still prefer using extra might, but it's a good point that it's possible to balance extra shots by more finely dividing them.

(Though extra shots do still scale multiplicatively with the power of your launcher+ammo, while extra might scales linearly)

Absolutely agreed -- a common complaint about Crawl is that this is what's happened to it. But that doesn't mean you should ignore balance altogether either, and I'd say that extra shots is probably the oldest really outrageous balance issue in Vanilla today.

I also think that giving +might would feel better, because the player is doing lots of damage in single shots rather than lesser damage in many shots. Not to mention there'd be less ammo management hassle. And it's not like the player would be substantially unhappier to find a Sling of Buckland (x6) than a Sling of Buckland (x4) (+2 shots), right? It's still an awesome sling! It's just not "okay, now I kill literally everything in the game with pebbles because it's 300+ damage/round better than anything else I can do" awesome. Likewise, a randart that gives +2 might is pretty cool, just not so distortingly cool as one that gives +1 shots.

I totally agree, especially this bit: I also think that giving +might would feel better, because the player is doing lots of damage in single shots rather than lesser damage in many shots.

I find it very boring and unsatisfying to fire 6 shots while the enemy does nothing, while time effectively stands still. It's really boring and probably the one thing that turns me off from playing a ranger. Not only is it boring, but running out of ammo all the time is tedious. I find it *much* more satisfying having each missile do more damage while the enemy does stuff between my fired shots. I've actually used launchers that do less damage per round because it was so much more fun/satisfying to use the launcher that did more damage per missile than lots of missiles per round.

Why not treating shots like blows? Just use fractional shot system and add fractional amounts of shots instead, so +1 to "extra shots" is actually +1 to "faster shooting" and only gives 10% extra shooting speed (1.1 shots per round). I never liked the "shooting uses half a turn" system with +1 ES, because you cannot do much with that remaining "half turn" except shoot another arrow.